Thought Leadership

Maximize your global reach with private marketplaces

May 14, 2015

By Jay Sears

Many digital publishers have built significant global reach in the aggregate, but when it comes to taking advantage of that worldwide reach, they’ve been largely constrained. Often, their major investments in sales and direct relationships have remained limited to where their reach is most concentrated – their home markets.

With agencies also focused mainly on their home turfs, publishers have tended to mark foreign IPs and cross-border traffic in secondary markets “remnant” by default, trading for digital dimes instead of dollars, if indeed they were traded at all.

But this has started to change. The penetration of real-time bidding has paved the way for truly global exchanges that help premium sellers maximize revenues, regardless of their audience’s location.

And with automated guaranteed buying and private marketplaces, both buyers and sellers benefit from increased efficiency, faster deal setup and execution, and hence lower fixed costs, allowing buyers to incorporate media outlets into their plans that they may have historically overlooked as not worth the operational investment.

As a result of these technologies, we’ve seen a range of successful global exchanges launched by digital publishers recently, including News Corp, Turner, Viacom and, most recently, Future. But how can sellers globalize their base of private advertiser relationships the smart way?

Use your open auction campaigns as a ‘barometer’ for global sales opportunities

The real-time bidding protocol has effectively turned publishers’ sites and mobile apps into a lead generation tool. High-bidding buyers, regardless of their locations, can be identified as targets for one-to-one deals. Forward-thinking global sellers like the Guardian and DailyMotion have spoken of using real-time bidding as a ‘barometer’ for where they should focus globally.

For those sellers who have yet to develop robust automated guaranteed and private marketplace strategies, open auction campaigns provide many clues as to where to start. Sellers should use data about the advertisers bidding on their inventory across the world to gauge where opportunities for private deals with global advertisers might lie.

Determine where to aim for global automated deals

With opportunities identified, sellers can now zero in on which private deals they should attempt. Using a model we describe as the “magic quadrant”, sellers can identify their first targets for direct deals by reaching out to advertisers who are not being serviced directly, but who have shown a high affinity for the seller’s audience. Through platforms like our own, these packages can be segmented by geography, and placed at the fingertips of potential buyers around the globe in as little as a few minutes.

Thanks to the continued evolution of automated advertising, combining your inventory with proprietary data has been possible for a while now. Doing this can lead to even higher-yielding, audience-based automated guaranteed and private marketplace deals. As a seller with a unique, quality audience, unlocking this first-party data can form another key addition to marketing yourself to global buyers.

With the right strategy and a smart platform to package your inventory, layer in your data, and make it searchable by buyers, you can quickly and efficiently begin globalizing your relationships, and providing valuable global audiences to willing buyers.